Violeta Seretan
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Contact information: ISSCO/TIM/ETI, University of Geneva 40 bd. du Pont-d'Arve CH-1211 Geneva 4 Switzerland |
Tel: +41 22 379 8683 Office number: 6336 ![]() |
Background and Research Interests
I am a maître-assistante at the Faculty of Translation and Interpretation, University of Geneva. I joined TIM/ISSCO in September, 2011 to carry out research on statistical machine translation in the framework of the ACCEPT European project.
I have previously been a maître-assistante at LATL in the Department of Linguistics, University of Geneva (2008-2010), then a visiting researcher at ILCC, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh (2010-2011). I have received my PhD in Computational Linguistics from the University of Geneva in June, 2008. My PhD thesis "Collocation Extraction Based on Syntactic Parsing" (supervisor: Eric Wehrli) has been awarded the University of Geneva Latsis 2010 Prize and has been at the root of a monograph published in 2011 by Springer.
I have been working on Computational Linguistics ever since I was an undergraduate student in Computer Science at the University of Iasi, Romania, and a member of the NLP Group led by Dan Cristea. My research has been focused on topics related to language analysis, computational lexicography, and, more recently, to machine translation and language generation:
- collocations, multi-word expressions
- lexical acquisition, association measures
- context-sensitive dictionaries
- syntactic parsing
- text alignment, parallel concordancing
- machine translation, translation aids and tools
- corpus linguistics, Web as a corpus
- textual entailment, nominalization
- discourse analysis, anaphora
- argumentative analysis
- linear programming approaches to NLP
- text-to-text generation
- text simplification
- text readability
Teaching Activities
I teach the following courses:- XML et documents multilingues (autumn 2011)
- Séminaire de recherche (spring 2012)
Recent publications (past 5 years)
- Seretan, Violeta (2012). Acquisition of Syntactic Simplification Rules for French. In Proceedings of the Eight International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12), Istanbul, Turkey.
[html abstract] [pdf] [bib]
- Seretan, Violeta (2011). A Collocation-Driven Approach
to Text Summarization. In Actes de la 18e
conférence sur le Traitement Automatique des Langues Naturelles,
pages 9–14, Montpellier, France.
[html abstract] [pdf] [bib]
- Seretan, Violeta and Eric Wehrli (to appear). Syntactic
concordancing and multi-word expression detection. International
Journal of Data Mining, Modelling and Management, Special Issue on "Computational Linguistics-Applications".
[html abstract] [pdf] [ bib]
- Seretan, Violeta and Eric Wehrli (2011). FipsCoView:
On-line Visualisation of Collocations Extracted
from Multilingual Parallel Corpora. In Proceedings of the
Workshop on Multiword Expressions: from
Parsing and Generation to the Real World , pages 125–127,
Portland, Oregon, USA.
[html abstract] [pdf] [bib]
- Seretan, Violeta (2011). Syntax-Based Collocation Extraction. Springer (Text, Speech and Language Technology, volume 44). ISBN: 978-94-007-0133-5.
[bib]
- Wehrli, Eric, Violeta Seretan, and Luka Nerima (2010). Sentence
analysis and collocation identification. In Proceedings
of the Workshop on Multiword Expressions: from Theory to Applications
(MWE 2010), pages 27–35, Beijing, China.
[html abstract] [pdf] [bib]
- Seretan, Violeta and Eric Wehrli (2010). Tools for
syntactic concordancing. In Proceedings of the
International Multiconference on Computer Science and Information
Technology, pages 493–500, Wisła, Poland.
[html abstract] [pdf] [bib]
- Seretan, Violeta and Eric Wehrli (2010). Extending a
multilingual symbolic parser to Romanian. In Dan Tufis and
Corina Forascu (eds.): Multilinguality and Interoperability in
Language Processing with Emphasis on Romanian, Romanian Academy
Publishing House.
[html abstract] [pdf] [bib]
- Seretan, Violeta, Eric Wehrli, Luka Nerima, and Gabriela Soare
(2010). FipsRomanian: towards a Romanian version of the Fips
syntactic parser. In Proceedings of the Seventh
Conference on International Language Resources and Evaluation
(LREC'10), Valletta, Malta.
[html abstract] [pdf] [bib] [poster]
- Luka Nerima, Eric Wehrli, and Violeta Seretan (2010). A
recursive treatment of collocations. In Proceedings of
the Seventh Conference on International Language Resources and
Evaluation (LREC'10), Valletta, Malta.
[html abstract] [pdf] [bib]
- Wehrli, Eric, Luka Nerima, Violeta Seretan, and Yves Scherrer
(2009). On-line and off-line translation aids for non-native
readers. In Proceedings of the International
Multiconference on Computer Science and Information Technology, pages
299–303, Mrągowo, Poland.
[html abstract] [pdf] [bib]
- Seretan, Violeta (2009). Extraction de collocations et
leurs équivalents de traduction à partir de corpus
parallèles ('Extracting collocations and translation
equivalents from parallel corpora'). TAL,
50(1):305–332. In French.
[html abstract] [pdf] [bib] [data: VO, AN, NPN]
- Seretan, Violeta (2009). An integrated environment for
extracting and translating collocations. In Proceedings
of the Fifth Corpus Linguistics Conference, Liverpool,
U.K.
[html abstract] [pdf] [bib]
- Wehrli, Eric, Violeta Seretan, Luka Nerima, and Lorenza Russo
(2009). Collocations in a rule-based MT system: A case study
evaluation of their translation adequacy. In Proceedings
of the 13th Annual Meeting of the European Association for Machine
Translation, pages 128–135, Barcelona, Spain.
[html abstract] [pdf] [bib]
- Michou, Athina and Violeta Seretan (2009). A tool for
multi-word expression extraction in Modern Greek using syntactic parsing.
In Proceedings of the Demonstrations Session at EACL 2009,
pages 45–48, Athens, Greece.
[html abstract] [pdf] [bib]
- Seretan, Violeta and Eric Wehrli (forthcoming). Context-sensitive
look-up in electronic dictionaries. In Rufus H. Gouws, Ulrich
Heid, Wolfgang Schweickard, Herbert Ernst Wiegand (editors) Dictionaries.
An international encyclopedia of lexicography. Supplementary volume:
Recent developments with special focus on computational lexicography, Handbooks
of Linguistics and Communications Science. Walter de Gruyter,
Berlin/New York.
[html abstract] [pdf] [bib]
- Seretan, Violeta and Eric Wehrli (2009). Multilingual
collocation extraction with a syntactic parser. Language
Resources and Evaluation, 43(1), 71–85. DOI:
10.1007/s10579-008-9075-7. The
original publication is available at www.springerlink.com.
[html abstract] [pdf] [bib]
- Seretan, Violeta (2008).
Collocation Extraction Based on Syntactic Parsing. Ph.D.
thesis, University of Geneva.
[html abstract] [pdf preamble] [bib]
- Seretan, Violeta and Eric Wehrli (2007). Collocation
translation based on sentence alignment and parsing. In Actes
de la 14e conférence sur le Traitement Automatique des Langues
Naturelles (TALN 2007), pages 401–410, Toulouse, France. Best
Paper Award.
[html abstract] [pdf] [bib]
- Pallotta, Vincenzo, Violeta Seretan and Marita Ailomaa (2007).
User requirements analysis for Meeting Information Retrieval based on
query elicitation. In Proceedings of the 45th Annual
Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2007),
pages 1008–1015, Prague, Czech Republic.
[html abstract][pdf] [bib]
- Pallotta, Vincenzo, Violeta Seretan, Marita Ailomaa, Hatem
Ghorbel, and Martin Rajman (2007). Towards an argumentative
coding scheme for annotating meeting dialogue data. In Proceedings
of the 10th International Pragmatics Association Conference (IPrA),
Göteborg, Sweden, 2007.
[html abstract][pdf] [bib]
- Biemann, Chris, Violeta Seretan, and Ellen Riloff, editors
(2007). Proceedings
of the ACL 2007 Student Research Workshop. Association for
Computational Linguistics, Prague, Czech Republic.
[bib]
Full list of publications
Reviewing
*SEM-2012, LREC 2012, ACL 2012, EACL 2012, CIJC 2012, ConsILR 2011, CLA'11, RANLP 2011, MWE 2011, ACL/HLT 2011, CLA'10, ConsILR 2010, MWE 2010, COLING 2010, ACL 2010, LREC 2010, PROMISE 2010, MWE 2009, ConsILR 2009, ConsILR 2008, MWE 2008, ConsILR 2007, ACL07-MWE, EUROLAN 2007 Doctoral Consortium, RANLP-2007, AMML (W6@RANLP 2007), MWE 2006, ROMAND 2006 ACM TSLP Special Issue on MWEs (2012), Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (2012), Natural Language Engineering (2011, 2008), Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology (2010), Language Resources and Evaluation (2008), Computational Linguistics (December 2007, Vol. 33, No. 4)
Conference organisation
- ACL 2007 Student Research Workshop, Prague, Czech Republic, June 26, 2007
- Co-chair, with Chris Biemann and Ellen Riloff (Faculty Advisor)
- EACL 2006 Student Research Workshop, Trento, Italy, April 6, 2006
- Co-chair, with Sebastian Pado and Jonathon Read
- EACL Student Board member (2005–2007)




